Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

It was a penetrating voyage into the glass of the dressing-table (deal for the boys). According to mood, he might take his pince-nez off, blurring the image, allowing his imagination to play amongst the hydrangeas, or alternately he would clip the lenses firmly on, and refuse himself any avenues of escape from that intellectual ruthlessness he knew himself to possess. (He had once described the geography of his face in seven foolscap pages.) The optician’s formula made his eyes appear paler, his chin less pronounced, his moustache patchier under the brilliantine, but hadn’t the whole botched mess — he was prepared to face it — helped give birth to that proven sensibility?

On his thirtieth birthday he smiled at himself in reflection, for the strangeness of it. Then he shuffled the expanding arm-bands up his sleeves, put on his workday coat, and went into the kitchen where she was getting his breakfast for him.

“It’s odd to think I’m thirty,” he said, forestalling the probable question of how he felt about it.

He stood looking down at the pair of eggs, their ruffles edged with a brown frizz.

“I think, dear, you were born thirty,” she said.

In her cool voice. Allowing him her cool kiss. She, if anybody, should have known.

His mother was wearing the old blue dressing-gown with the safety-pin which failed to disguise the financial truth or her operation. Since Dad died in 1922 she had been dependent on him. (Arthur contributed something.)

Some people would have considered his — their mother, dowdy. He could only think of her as timeless, actually so, because she was not taken in by his thirtieth birthday. She, too, realized there were no compartments. Thirty or seventeen.

At seventeen — on his seventeenth birthday as it turned out — he had presented himself at Sydney Municipal Library, to take up the position he got thanks to Fairy Flour. So it had been hinted. Only the malicious could have ignored the true state of affairs: a spotty youth wheeling trollies of books between the stacks. Neither light nor air played much part in the sinecure his patroness had bought him. Sometimes the cages were jammed so full, his fellow-suffering and cracking ribs caused him to wonder how easily a person might contract consumption and retire early on a pension. He read one or two works on the subject of that disease. Shoving them back according to numbers he got to hate the physical presence of books. Never lost his respect for them, of course. But could have hurt any book shoving it back. Occasionally he shoved one so far away from its recorded cell he hoped it would never be found again. The thick porous pages of some of the old public books, ravelled at the edges into lint, clotted with snot, smeary with spittle and nicotine, smelled of old men in greasy raincoats, in hats which their foreheads melted, but which soon set stiff and cold if left standing.

Pffeugh, the books! The injustice necessity had done him was proclaimed by the mirrors of many public lavatories, along with the warnings against venereal disease. He would drop in to wash his hands, though who knew if you mightn’t pick up something worse from the tap. Still, you had to wash your hands. There was a period when he couldn’t wash them enough.

His purple hands. It was the ink-pads. He was marked from the start. But hadn’t he given himself to books? Waldo is the bookish one, takes after his father in that . And sometimes even then, in the stacks of the Municipal Library, in the sound of dust, and the smell of decaying, aged flesh, he would open a book to dedicate himself anew. And he would stand shivering for the daring of words, their sheer ejaculation.

On one occasion Waldo Brown had found:

In my dry brain my spirit soon,

Down-deepening from swoon to swoon,

Faints like a dazzled morning moon.

The wind sounds like a silver wire,

And from beyond the noon a fire

Is pour’d upon the hills, and nigher

The skies stoop down in their desire …

He shut the book so quick, so tight, the explosion might have been heard by anyone coming to catch him at something forbidden disgraceful and which he would never dare again until he could no longer resist. He looked round, but found nobody else in the stacks. Only books. A throbbing of books. He went to the lavatory to wash his hot and sticky hands.

So the life had its compensations, an orgasm in dry places, a delicious guilt of the intellect. It made him superior to poor Dad, whose innocence from a previous age must have denied him even the vicarious sensuality of literature.

Waldo Brown was superior also to Walter Pugh, his superior by eighteen months.

Waldo didn’t care for Walter. Pimples were just about the only thing they had in common (if you discounted literature, which, in Wally’s case, Waldo couldn’t believe in). Waldo was thin, might pass for tall, with thin to disappearing lips, his sculptured chin, good carriage inherited from his mother — distinction , in fact, was how he saw it in writing — whereas Wally was thick, to very fat on hot days, a splurge of lips a little open, a little shiny from the bacon he could have been eating a moment or two before, his seams splitting, especially at the thighs of those pants belonging to something else.

Wally said: “I’d give anything for a tart tonight on me way home. Sit all night there at home with Cis and Ern. Sometimes I think I’ll bust, Waldo, if I don’t get meself a girl. There was one on the ferry gave me the eye. I just on accepted the invite walking up from the wharf. You could do it in that bit of scrub before you get to Permanent Avenue.”

“You’d be very unwise,” Waldo said.

“Oh, I know,” said Wally Pugh. “The pox and all that. Or a kid. But I’ll bust, Waldo, if I don’t. I’m gunna!”

Even when the glass above the wash-basin spelled the warnings out.

“The trouble with you, Waldo, you’re cold. Or is it luck? Praps after all you’re a lucky bugger.”

“It’s not what they told me Friday,” Waldo felt himself compelled.

His hands folding over the soap enjoyed a sensuality of their own.

“Who?” asked Wal.

“The two of them. I can’t say they appealed. Not particularly. Though the one in pink wasn’t bad.”

“You mean you did them both?”

Waldo was too superior to answer.

“Golly!” Walter Pugh said. “Did you know them?”

“One of them, slightly. The other was her friend.”

“What was their names, Waldo?”

“I think the friend was Nell. Yes, Nell. The one I knew — slightly, she’s called Dulcie.”

“And Dulcie’s good, eh? You bloody old bugger! You fast old dark horse!”

“She’s only what I’d call pretty average. She’s a thin, dark, plain girl. She’ll never be up to much because of the salt-cellars. She’s hairy too, about the arms.”

Betrayals brought the gooseflesh out on Waldo. Irresistibly.

“But you got your whack, you old bugger!”

“If that’s what appeals, but it doesn’t — to me — particularly.”

“Go on! Then you are cold, Waldo. You’re the coldest fish I’ll ever hope to meet.”

Only superior.

Walter Pugh showed Waldo three poems he had written. Waldo would have called them jingles, rather. When he had written enough of them, as he intended, Walter was going to offer them as a volume, and join the ranks of the Australian poets. Waldo’s lips fairly disappeared, though he didn’t comment. He knew for certain he would never show Wally anything he wrote, he would never show anyone; it was too foolish. Certainly he had confided in Dulcie Feinstein that he was going to be a writer, but then he was only — sixteen, was it? and stupid.

And not long after, Mrs Feinstein had taken her daughter away. So it was told.